New FreeBSD Version 7.3: improved ZFS and Gnome 2.28.2

Ken Smith from the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced the released version 7.3 for download. The new FreeBSD comes with updated ZFS and a re-worked bootloader.

According to the announcement, the bootloader gptzfsboot, which supports GPT and ZFS, is among the most significant improvements included in the current maintenance release of the stable 7.x- branch. Originally developed by Sun, the FreeBSD team have upgraded the data system to version 13. KDE and Gnome are in versions 4.3.5/ 2.28.2 included.

FreeBSD 7.3 can be downloaded from several mirror servers, and as Torrent for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. Besides network installation, CD and DVDs are also available. Version 7.3 is expected to be followed by one more update for the current stable branch. After that, the team will be concentrating on the maintenance of version 8.0

The BSD variant, FreeBSD, has just updated to version 7.0. According to announcements on the project’s website, performance and exploitation of multiple processor architectures have been greatly improved.

Free software covers such a diverse range of utilities, applications, and other assorted projects that it can be hard to find the perfect tool. We pick the best of the bunch. This month we look at IPodder, FreeBSD 6, and SynCE.